Yeah, this one’s on the money. That said, I think I’m still going to call myself an anarchist, and even participate in anarchist discourses.

Here’s why: I don’t think anarchism has very much theory as anarchism. Its a lot of very convincing rhetoric built on other people’s theory. Emma Goldman for example came from the Pale of Settlement, where there was a Jewish tradition of mutual aid, parallel power structures, fighting the police, etc. Then she read neitschze, Marx, Thereau, befriended Margaret Sanger (Goldman was a Eugenecist, all your faves are problematic), and participated in queer poly relationships and the labor movement. Her writings are reflective of those theories and lived practices, not of a specifically anarchist discourse, the way we could talk about Mao’s writing as being within a specifically Marxist discourse (although we could go into Mao’s readings of the anarchists, Buddhists, Confuscians, European enlightenment figures and complicate the issue.)

If you look at modern anarchism, it’s the same. People aren’t quoting Reclusée or Kropotkin for the most part, they’re reading the feminists, indigenous studies, and the post structuralists. Anarchism isn’t so much a set of theories but a way of approaching other social theories.

And again, I could complicate this by looking at report backs and zines on tactics and the ongoing shifting approach to activism in anarchist circles, but that’s another story that I haven’t put in conversation with the one i told yet.